This invention relates to an improved sheet inverting system, and more particularly, to a low cost inverter adapted to be placed within the normal paper path of low volume copier/printer products while providing enhanced product design possibilities due to its compact configuration.
In the field of reprographic machines, it is often necessary to feed along one of two alternate paths a copy sheet leaving the processor or the machine, particularly when the machine can selectively produce simplex (one-sided) and duplex (two-sided) sheets. Simplex sheets may be fed directly to an output tray, whereas the duplex sheets may pass to a sheet feeder which automatically reverses the direction of movement of a simplex sheet and feeds it back into the processor, but inverted, so that the appropriate data can be applied to the second side of the sheet. One known sheet-feeder (U.S. Pat. No. 4,359,217) for effecting this includes three rollers in frictional or geared contact with each other, to provide two spaced-apart nips, one being an input nip to an associated downstream sheet pocket, and the other being an output nip for extracting each sheet from the pocket. A sheet reversing apparatus for reorienting a sheet so that a first side and an opposing side of the sheet may be operated upon is provided in U.S. Pat. No. 3,862,802 which includes a web for storing the sheets. These inverters have shortcomings when adaptation is attempted for insertion into low volume machines since they are costly, cumbersome and require more machine volume to implement than is desired.
The present invention aims at providing an inverter designed to have both simplex and duplex sheet fed to it along a common input path, and which sorts out the sheets as they are fed along the common path and either returns them in a direction opposite to the sheet feeding direction or passes the sheets further along the original sheet feed direction.